We document the growth in higher education costs and tuition over the past 50 years. To explain these trends, we develop a general equilibrium model with skill- and sector-biased technical change. We assume that higher education suffers from Baumol's (1967) service sector disease, in that the...

This paper examines how the accumulation of human capital determines both a country's growth rate and income inequality. In contrast to previous work, we do not rely on credit market imperfections or political economy arguments. The insight of this model is that inequality is determined by the...

This paper presents a general equilibrium assignment model of workers to tasks with endogenous supply of skills. The model has 2 key features. First, skills are endogenous and multidimensional. Second, two types of assignment occur; workers self-select the type of skills to supply and firms...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to highlight the role of human capital accumulation of agents differentiated by skill type in the joint determination of social mobility and the skill premium. We first show that our model captures the empirical co-movement of the skill...

Is skill dispersion a source of comparative advantage? While it is established that a country's aggregate endowment of human capital is an important determinant of comparative advantage, this paper investigates whether the distribution of skills in the labor force can play a role in the...

This paper highlights the way in which workers of different age and ability are affected by anticipated and unanticipated trade liberalisations. A two-factor (skilled and unskilled labour), two-sector Heckscher-Ohlin model is supplemented with an education sector which uses skilled labour and...

It is commonly believed that accumulation of human capital (HC) and availability of physical and financial capitals are among the major determinants of economic growth. In a globalised world, where factors of production are increasingly mobile, the process of domestic accumulation of HC might be...

The main purpose of the paper is to examine the effects of trade reform on the skill structure of the urban formal and the informal sectors. Two types of trade reforms are considered here: reduction in tariff and reduction in export subsidy. My analysis shows that a tariff reduction raises...

There is an increasing trend in the pattern of world migration of educated and skilled individuals leaving developing countries for developed ones. This has created much concern about a so-called “brain drain”. As the name suggests, the brain drain was believed by early commentators to be...

Using a dynamic skill accumulation model of schooling and labor supply with learning-by-doing, we decompose early life-cycle wage growth of U.S. white males into four main sources: education, hours worked, cognitive skills (AFQT scores) and unobserved heterogeneity, and evaluate the effect of...